Take the Political Instability Task Force, funded by the CIA and based at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Since it was formed in 1994, it has used historical data on conflicts, political structures and economics to rate the stability of countries around the world. Details of the model are publicly available, but the forecasts that the task force hands to the CIA are not.
Monty Marshall, a member of the task force, says models tend to do well at simulating historical events, but fail when it comes to predicting future unrest. “I don’t know if any of these efforts have been successful, and if they have been we wouldn’t know about it because it’d be classified,” he says.
Wired has an article on this topic this week. It quotes Mark Abdollahian of Sentia Group, which has built dozens of predictive models for government agencies, saying: “All of our models are bad, some are less bad than others.”
Short Sharp Science: Why models couldn’t predict North African revolutions
It is possible to predict that if the dollar is the reserve currency of the world and it’s devaluated, that food prices would rise. Rising food prices produce unrest. Along with an increasingly unaffordable dowry price young men have to come up with as well as showing any future father in laws they have a stable income. Combine single young men without hope and a food shortage unrest is very easy to predict. My guess is it will spread not only in the Arab states but to even parts of South America.